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"FINDING BUDDIES" by Alan Gathright

FINDING BUDDIES: Man, computer reunite veterans
By Alan Gathright

Chuck and Janet Wells are happily married and living in Arcadia, La., thanks to Tom Wagner and his TRS-80 Model II.
Two Army buddies, John Schuler and Don Apgar, were living six blocks apart in Los Angeles but didn't know it until Wagner and his computer reunited the pair.
These happy endings spring from Wagner's frustrated efforts to find his Korean War comrades. Four years ago he began a one-man reunion service, now called the Veteran's Alumni Association.
"None of these guys can find each other," said Wagner, who runs the association from his East Dallas home at 10326 Springhaven Drive.
"We lived, ate, slept and got wounded together. Then we never saw each other again."
Unable to locate friends through the government or veterans organizations, Wagner decided he might be able to help others in the same situations.
During his cross-country travels as a restaurant consultant, he began collecting veterans' names, addresses and information about their military units on cards. After filling several shoe boxes with cards, Wagner tired of flipping through the cards to match veterans, and he purchased the computer with his son.
The system is simple. In Schuler's case, he asked Wagner to find Apgar after hearing about the association from friends. Wagner found Apgar in his files and wrote him a letter.
Playing computer Cupid for the Wellses, Wagner said, was his most satisfying effort.
Chuck met Janet at an Air Force base in Nebraska in 1976 when she was a young aircraft mechanic and he was her master sergeant.
Because the military frowned on superiors fraternizing with subordinates, Wells said, "We went out together . . . but nobody said anything about being real close."
Both left the Air Force in the summer of 1979, Chuck heading for California and Janet for her native Michigan. It wasn't long before the former sergeant began having second thoughts.
"I knew a lot of things hadn't been said, but I didn't know where she was," said Wells, a 20-year Air Force veteran. He found Janet though Wagner's association after a friend told him about it.
"In the first letter I told her I didn't really do it right; I wish we had gotten closer," he said. "She wrote me back and told me she felt so, too."
They married less than a year after their reunion. Now the Wellses have gone back to college together, Chuck studying personnel management and Janet landscape architecture.
Wells, thwarted in his efforts to find other comrades through veterans magazine advertisements, called the association "fantastic."
Schuler said that after leaving the Army, he found himself missing the camaraderie of Apgar a medic he met while stationed in West Germany in the early '60s.
Schuler said that when he finally found Apgar through Wagner's association in 1979, he learned "just how small the world really is."
During their first conversation in more that a decade, the men discovered that they lived only six blocks apart, their daughters attended the same elementary school and they had worked in the same carnival booth on different days.
Despite such victories, Wagner said the association has far to go. Because of federal privacy laws, he cannot gain access to the government's often outdated list of veteran's addresses. His computer's file of just over 1,600 veterans is minuscule compared with the 28.5 million veterans in America.
"As the years go by I'm more determined to find them," he said, holding up a tattered group photograph of his outfit in Korea.
Now silver-haired, the 51-year-old Wagner shows a visitor snapshots of himself as a bespectacled, crew-cut private standing in Korean battle camp.
The photos are his only link to old comrades: shy and lanky Paul Gorham, his best friend from training camp; "Short Round" Poindexter, a scrappy 5-foot-2 infantryman; Dean Smith, who after the war unexpectedly mailed Wagner the $25 he had borrowed in Korea; the captain who "spent the entire Korea; the captain who "spent the entire Korean War in his bunker making model trains."